I encourage you to read both as Digg has been important – dare I
say instrumental? – in how we think about aspects of tech, news,
news feeds, gamification, community, algorithmic aggregation,
etc.

Digg can – and hopefully will – remain important. As MG wrote,
“it’s hard to imagine a better steward than Betaworks
to try to make that happen.”

I wanted to also touch upon two themes related to Digg:

Most importantly, Digg is a fascinating paradox between
aggregation and personalization. I have had blog posts hit the
front page of Digg and received 75,000+ unique visits within the
sixty-minutes (if my memory serves me correctly). That’s a
staggering amount of traffic and really, for non-major media
sources, not available anywhere else. That amount of traffic and
immediacy could only really occur from an aggregated, one-for-all
feed (by the way, Digg’s impact on the ‘newsfeed’ as we know it
is very under appreciated). That one-for-all feed made:

- Digg such a valuable source of traffic
- gave power users such power and authority
- and made Digg’s homepage a newspaper / Techmeme-like hub

The paradox of course is that consumers want personalization
(Facebook’s feed and the focus on Edgerank are an example of
personalization effectively working) – but this weakens the power
of the publishers and therefor the traffic generation to the top
destinations. Tough to balance.

Both themes are of course related: there is a difference between
publishing and consuming. For those complaining that Kate
Middleton’s gown is not worthy of a Wikipedia
entry, they don’t have to read (or append) the entry. Some of
that is personal choice and some of that can be affected by
personalization.